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Topic: The Canterbury Catch Club. 1779-1865 (Read 1181 times)

I find your post re the Catch Club very interesting. The Catch club met at the Prince of Orange in Orange Street Canterbury. The Prince of Orange was in the confines of what is now known as The Odfellows Hall. My GGGGG/Father John Small was Licensee of The Prince of Orange from about 1800 until his death in 1825. I found out fairly recently that he died by cutting his own throat.Surprising what you find whilst researching your family roots.

A Catch is a musical composition in which two or more voices, (usually at least three) repeatedly sing the same melody, beginning at different times. Generally catches have a secular theme, though many collections included devotional rounds and cannons.

A brief history of Canterbury Catch Club.

The catch Club existed between 1779 and 1865, but it was undoubtedly the first half of the nineteenth century which witnessed its glory days. Reading the Minutes, this seems remarkable: given the endless problems with the air pump, the Ladies' Room, and the various musical celebrities from foreign countries (Italy, America) engaged from time to time by the club, it is something of a wonder that a series of thirty concerts of vocal and orchestral music was held every Wednesday evening from October to May throughout this period.

Whatever visiting celebrities may have contributed, most of the evening's music would have been provided by the members themselves; all would have been capable of holding a part in the 'catches' which lie at the heart of the Club's repertoire. The more sophisticated glees would have been sung by the more musically proficient members of the Club, and these would have included the musicians in the service of the Cathedral at the time.

Club subscriptions (20 shillings for a season in 1840, with fines for non-attendance!) paid for instrumental music, too. The Club patronised an orchestra, with conductor, though this seems to have occasioned a degree of discord which belied the motto painted on the scroll above their stall: the exhortation to 'Harmony and Unanimity' seems seldom to have been heeded, as the number of rules governing the conduct of the orchestral musicians proliferated throughout this time and the matter of the conductor's salary is a running debate in the Committee's Minutes. In spite of these vicissitudes, however, it is clear that the Canterbury Catch Club was a lively fixture on Canterbury's cultural scene for almost a century.